I saw (on a Severance subreddit of all places) a tweet from someone with the quip “the two worst feelings in the world are not having a job and having a job”. There’s a profound amount of truth in that. For the last 5 weeks, I have been in the incredibly fortunate position of not being in either of those positions. I left my position at Rippling in early May, and I already have my next job lined up (Samsara). This is by far the longest personal break that I’ve taken between jobs, and it’s the most time off that I’ve had since graduating college. I’m happy and proud to say that I accomplished a lot during the last five weeks.

One thing I did even before the sabbatical started is to create some goals for myself to accomplish during the time. I had four general areas that I wanted to spend time in. First, I wanted to push my physical body. I’m 40, but I’m in the best shape of my life, and I wanted to explore the limits of what I was capable of. Second, I wanted to (re-)engage the artistic and creative side of my brain, which I almost never have time for when I’m working full time. Third, I had accumulated a lot of “technical debt”, and I used this as an opportunity to clean up (literally in some cases) and organize. Finally, I wanted to spend more time with my family, especially my two daughters.

I’ll list the specific goals and where I ended up on those goals. As you’ll see, I didn’t fully accomplish every single goal, but if I’m grading myself, OKR-style, I definitely hit 0.7, and more importantly, I accomplished the spirit behind all the goals.

Athletic and Physical

1. Ride a century ✅
   I often told my colleagues that on my first day after leaving work, I would go for a very long bike ride. That pretty much happened, again and again. I accomplished my goal of riding a century (a 100 mile-ride) by riding from my home in Cupertino to the Golden Gate Bridge and back. It's the second century that I've done, but this one had a lot more elevation that my previous one through Gilroy. In general, I explored a lot more of the biking routes in the south bay and peninsula, including finally riding up the infamous Old La Honda road in Woodside. In total, I rode just a shade under 550 miles during the last five weeks.
2. Drop down to 160 pounds ❌
   I have been on a prolonged weight loss journey for the last 5 years. At my peak, I was over 250 pounds. I'm proud to say that I've dropped over 80 pounds of that, and kept the weight off. For this sabbatical, I set a very aggressive stretch goal of dropping down to 160. I started the sabbatical at 168 pounds. This morning, I weighed in at my lowest number ever (or at least, since my teens) at 161.4 pounds. So no, I didn't accomplish the goal, but I did make significant progress, and I'm proud of what I achieved, both in the last 5 weeks, and especially over the last 5 years.
3. Average double my calorie goal ✅
   Like many others, I have found the Apple Watch to be really fun for gamifying my workouts and tracking progress. My daily move goal is 800 calories. If I'm able to double my move goal, it was usually a very active day. I set out to actually average doubling my move goal. For some context, in March and April, I averaged roughly 1,320 active calories burned per day. During the last five weeks, I averaged 1,620 calories per day. I do think this is the physical limit for me. In order to do this, I had to do a bike ride, some weightlifting, and play basketball on most days. Ultimately, it's too much stress on my body to keep this up for much longer. I'll actually be glad to go back to work and be a little more stationary throughout the day.

Arts and Creativity

1. Rekindle my love for the violin ✅
   I had two very specific sub-goals, which I accomplished. First, I wanted to purchase a new bow. I had broken my bow several years ago, and I never had the time to do a proper evaluation of a new one (I've been using a very cheap coda bow in the meanwhile). I'm now the proud owner of a Camilo Herculano bow. I feel more confident in my playing, and over the last weeks, the bow has felt like a seamless extension of my bow arm. The second sub-goal was to learn a new violin piece. I learned Beethoven's Violin Sonata No. 8 in G major, and I even rehearsed a few times with my pianist friend. We plan to perform the piece in September, but I feel it's performance ready right now. More broadly, I remembered why I love the violin and playing music so much in the first place. I would like to keep up practicing at least once per week in the future, but it will be difficult if I don't have an external driver (i.e. the pressure of an upcoming concert date) driving me all the time.
2. Catalog my cooking recipes ✅
   I am the main cook for our family, and I definitely consider myself a foodie. I especially like to explore new recipes, and lately I've been eating much more healthy, emphasizing foods high in vegetables and protein. I started xingeats.com during the sabbatical. I have only written down a few recipes so far, but the framework is there and I'll add slowly to it. I'm also using that as the place to track restaurant reviews and general eating experiences. Part of the fun here was the act of creating a new website using something new to me, Wordpress. This blog is hosted on Jekyll and Amazon S3. The pros are that it's really cheap (like, it costs pennies per month) and it's very portable (every browser can read static HTML and some CSS). The con is that I have to write in markdown. For xingeats, I went with Wordpress because my default it needed to be more visual.
3. Read 5 books ❌
   I ended up completing 3 books, "Welcome to Pawnee" by Jim O'Heir, "Abundance" by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and "Men Who Hate Women" by Laura Bates. The Bates book in particular was really informative. I got a little stuck while reading "Abundance". It's good, but it wasn't all that gripping, so I didn't read as fast as I would've liked. Still, this was much faster than my usual reading pace.

Technical Debt

1. Clean out the house ✅
   "Technical Debt" is my catchall category for all the various small things that I wanted to catch up on. Perhaps nothing exemplifies that more than just doing a much needed spring cleaning that we haven't done for the last 3 years. I cleaned out the garage, cleaned our oven, cleaned out our office closet, reorganized the medicine cabinet, reorganized our pantry, and cleaned/donated many of the toys and clothes that are no longer needed by our daughters.
2. Sell basketball jerseys ✅
   I have a large collection of basketball jerseys (100+ and counting!), but due to my weight loss, many jerseys no longer fit me. I started selling on eBay, and it was remarkably easy. I've been able to sell 29 jerseys so far.
3. Get finances in order ✅
   There were three specific small tasks here. First, I wanted to set up 529 plans for my daughters. After some research, I decided to go with the Utah My529 plan, as it seemed to have the lowest fees and used Vanguard, which I'm already familiar with. Second, I wanted to move all of my various stock brokerage and retirement accounts under a single financial adviser. I decided to with a guy at Northwestern Mutual, and he has already proven his worth. Last, I needed to figure out what to do with my Rippling stock, in terms of how much to sell to prepare for AMT taxes and some of my short-term liquidity goals. The financial advisor was actually really instrumental in helping with this.
4. Create family photo books ❌
   I like the idea of physical pictures, and I have always wanted to create photo books for the years and years and thousands of pictures that we have. Alas, I just couldn't work up the motivation to tackle this (highly) menial task.

Family

1. Do something fun with the kids ✅
   We had two unforgettable experiences, both without mom. First, we attended the Timberwolves vs. Warriors playoff game 3. It was an epic game that the Timberwolves won. Celia wasn't available, as she had to spend a week in China helping her mom with some family matters. Second, the kids had a two-day period when there was no school or daycare, and Celia needed to be working. I decided that was the perfect time fo ran impromptu Disneyland trip. I drove them there and back, and we spent an entire day in the park. It was exhausting, but as always with Disneyland, the kids (and me too!) had a ton of fun.
2. Plan our Japan family trip ✅
   We are vacationing in Japan for two weeks at the end of July. I took this sabbatical as an opportunity to plan out our rough plans and book all the major lodging. Luckily, we were able to get both Ghibli Museum and Ghibli Park tickets, which I feel will be the highlights of the trip (but you never know!).

This turned out to be one of my longest blog posts, which I’m incredibly proud of. I fully utilized these 5 weeks. Having said that, it definitely got boring in the last two weeks. Trying to hit my exercise goals started to feel like a chore, and I wasn’t having as much fun riding my bike or playing basketball, activities which are normally my outlets for work frustration. I also had entire hours at a time where I would just try to motivate myself to read more. Finally, I found that I went grocery shopping a lot more often, just to have an excuse to leave the house during the day. All of this to say, I’m grateful for the last 5 weeks, but I’m super eager to get started in my new job.

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